I used to write for PC Magazine, whose editors invariably
throw out whatever title you put on your article and replace
it with one of their own gems, presumably to achieve a more
balanced and stylistically consistent table of contents.
I eventually got into the habit of putting silly titles
on my articles just to tease them, things like "What is
the Title of this Article?" (They never noticed the difference.)

When I wrote a comparison of word processors, I decided to
play with the name of the most famous one and came up with the
palindrome "Rats Drown in WORDSTAR." When I went up to the
magazine's editorial offices to turn in my article I showed
the palindrome to James Langdell, editor of the PC Communiqués
column and something of a humorist. He cracked up at the
silliness of it all, and to my surprise he even mentioned it
a few weeks later in his column:

MicroPro's
Rodent Processor

The only thing more difficult to explain than
inventing a palindrome is inventing a plausible explanation
for it. Regular PC contributor Dean Hannotte came up with an
elegant, PC-related sentence that reads the same forwards and
backwards. Since it's not the sort of thing you'd find occasion
to say more days of the week, I'll suggest a way to justify
Hannotte's polished gem into a conversation:
"I'm sure you've heard of debugging software. But did
you know that a popular program can dispose of larger pests?
Yes, it's true . . .
"RATS DROWN IN WORDSTAR."

Wait, that's not all. A few days after James' column appeared
I was teaching a class in UNIX at NYU -- their first ever, ahem.
At the break one of my students raised his hand and said, "Mr.
Hannotte, what did you think of your mention in the New York
Times today?" After they revived me, he showed me the Peripherals
computer
column by Peter Lewis from the Science Times section:

Self-Control
and WordStar

During one of those interminable waits at the terminal,
Dean Hannotte, a writer, discovered the following palindrome:
Rats drown in Wordstar.
Anyone who has spent time with this popular word-processing
program has probably felt the same way . . . .

Isn't it amusing to observe how Mr. Lewis left no stone unturned
in tracking down and verifying the facts of the incident he
reported? His retelling, in fact, is a complete fabrication!
So the next time you hear the phrase, "All the news that's
fit to print," you'll have a better idea of exactly what they're
talking about.

But the really funny thing is that if I'm remembered for
nothing else during my lifetime, 20,000 years from now people
will be able to look up "Dean Hannotte" in the New York Times
Database and see "palindrome, discoverer." Ah,
immortality . . . .

P.S. I guess it was bound to happen with the way the media
recycles everything, but in March 2000 Bill Maher quoted "Rats
drown in Wordstar" on "Politcally Incorrect". This worthless
monstrosity had stuck to the inside of that poor man's head for
15 years!